Violence and mental illness: five minutes with . . . Seena Fazel

“A major misconception is that mentioning a connection between mental illness and violence will increase stigma. Denying the association between the two doesn’t help anyone—because there is one. Instead, we need to get people treatment we know to be effective.

“Our umbrella review of meta analyses1 from last year highlighted that every single included study showed an increase in violent behaviour for all psychiatric disorders we studied except epilepsy, in comparison with the general population.

“The contribution of mental illness to violent crime is, however, often overstated. …